Quote

Every good book should be entertaining. A good book will be more it must not be less. Entertainment…is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can’t provide that, we may be excused from inquiring into its higher qualities.

C. S. Lewis

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C. S. Lewis
Age: 64 †
Born: 1898
Born: January 1
Died: 1963
Died: January 1
Autobiographer
Broadcaster
Essayist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Literary Scholar
Medievalist
Novelist
Belfast
Ireland
Clive Hamilton
N. W. Clerk
CS Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis
C.S. Lewis
Quality
Inquiring
Less
Examination
May
Entertaining
Book
Qualities
Must
Provide
Every
Entertainment
Good
Fiction
Excused
Like
Higher
Qualifying

More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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In God's dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube.
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Could one start a Stagnation Party-which at General Elections would boast that during its term of office no event of the least importance had taken place?
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Child,' said the Lion, 'I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own.
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A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.
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I have been suspected of being what is called a Fundamentalist. That is because I never regard any narrative as unhistorical simply on the ground that it includes the miraculous.
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If God had granted all the silly prayers I've made in my life, where should I be now?
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You never know what you can do until you try, and very few try unless they have to.
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It would be nice and fairly nearly true, to say that 'from that time forth, Eustace was a different boy.' To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun.
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This is the land of Narnia,' said the Faun, 'where we are now all that lies between the lamp-post and the great castle of Cair Paravel on the eastern sea.
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If you simply try to tell the truth you will, nine times out of ten, be original without ever having noticed it.
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Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years into domestic hatred.
C. S. Lewis
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A promise must be about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling a certain way.
C. S. Lewis
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Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man.
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The worst of sleeping out of doors is that you wake up so dreadfully early. And when you wake up you have to get up because the ground is so hard you are uncomfortable. And it makes matters worse if there is nothing but apples for breakfast and you have had nothing but apples for supper the night before.
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No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?
C. S. Lewis
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Prosperity knits a man to the world.
C. S. Lewis
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Agnostics talk cheerfully of man's search for God but they might as well talk about the mouse's search for the cat.
C. S. Lewis
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And there, right in the middle of it, I find 'Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.' There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven.
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You weren't a decent man and you didn't do your best. We none of us were and none of us did.
C. S. Lewis
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Everyone who believes in God at all believes that he knows what you and I are going to do tomorrow.
C. S. Lewis